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Tuesday, October 11, 2016

Our Ugly, Heartless, Immoral US Health Care System

I was just notified yesterday, by my brother, that a friend from childhood had had a stoke.

That was awful enough but, once again, it shows how wrong, horrible, even, our Capitalist, profit-driven health care system is in our nation.

Not only did he have a stroke, the poor guy, but was life-flighted to a local hospital here in Kansas City, from St. Joseph, an hour away. He then had a long stay in the hospital with numerous surgeries. It was apparently a massive stroke.

He's home now but to make all those matters even worse, he and his wife have no health insurance.

His wife is a middle school school teacher in St. Joseph (Missouri).

She continues to be his primary caregiver, which would be more than enough work and strain and stress as it is but then, she also has to hire help during the day for him, while she teaches.

Can you imagine the expenses?

From the life-flight to the emergency room to the surgeries to the daily expenses while he was there to, now, the medicines he no doubt has to have and the daily care for him? All of it? It must surely be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, those poor people.

And then there's the mental anguish his wife is unquestionably going through.

It's horrible. It's nearly unthinkable what they've been through and what they're going through.

Horrible as all this is, do you know what they'd owe in the UK, England, if this occurred to a citizen?

Zero.

They would owe nothing.

Sure, they'd have expenses but they all knew better, many decades ago, than to tie health care to profit and for just these very reasons.

I say again, our American health care system is the ugliest, most inhuman, inhumane, abusive, immoral, horrible, over-expensive, over-rated, disgusting health care system in the world, bar none. In no other nation do the people have to have fund raisers to cover family member's health care costs. We, here in the US, are the only nation that does that or has to. I imagine few Americans give any thought to that fact.

This is why we needed, and so badly, the Affordable Care Act, the ACA, "Obamacare." It's why we need to go further and have a single-payer system. We need universal health care. The rest of the civilized, educated, industrial world has it.